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    36 Hours in Joshua Tree, California: Things to Do and See

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    7 a.m.
    Hike to the site of a real-life Western drama
    California’s high-desert scenery often feels like the backdrop of an old western (in Pioneertown, northwest of the park, a set used for many films of the western genre still stands). For the nonfiction version of Wild West-like drama, enter the park via the west entrance and hike to the site of a showdown near the Wall Street Mill, once used to process gold mined in the area. In 1943, two neighbors entered into a fatal duel over a property line disagreement along what’s now the trail. On the path, a sign commemorating the shootout reads, “Here is where Worth Bagley bit the dust at the hand of W.F. Keys.” The sign is a replica of the original one that Keys, the mill’s owner, made and installed himself. At the end of the path, you’ll reach the ruins of the mill, flanked by rusted-out antique cars. The relatively easy hourlong round-trip feels like traveling back in time. More

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      When Spider-Man Met Jeff Koons

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      Our critic spots references to Hilma af Klint and Lichtenstein in “Across the Spider-Verse.” Koons, who inspired the film’s creative team, gets top billing with an animated survey (before his work is destroyed).“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the sequel to the 2018 reimagining of the arachnid-adolescent superhero, doubles down on the first installment with an inventive and magpie visual style. The result is, at least in part, a crash course in art history (literally so, as characters frequently crash into works of art).While the film is largely rendered in computer-generated animation that speeds by at a dizzying clip, there are moments of slowed, even stunning beauty: backgrounds dissolving with painterly effect, shifting into emotive abstraction reminiscent of, at turns, the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Hilma af Klint. New York’s cityscape is softened into brushy, Impressionistic swaths. Ben-Day dots stutter across the screen, a nod to the story’s comic book source material, but also calling up Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriations of the same.Justin K. Thompson, a director of the film, said the collision of techniques and applications was deliberate. “We wanted to emulate dry brush, watercolor, acrylic,” he said. “I looked a lot at the work of Paul Klee, the work of Lyonel Feininger.” The experimental films of John Whitney, a pioneer of computer animation, were another inspiration.There are also a number of more direct allusions to contemporary art. An early set piece in the Guggenheim Museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building allowed the filmmakers gleeful abandon. A version of the perennial Spider-Man villain Vulture that appears as if lifted from a Leonardo da Vinci parchment drawing tumbles through the museum’s rotunda, wielding weapons inspired by da Vinci’s fanciful and terrifying inventions and causing havoc in what quickly appears to be a Jeff Koons retrospective. The fight scene deploys several of Koons’s sculptures of inflatable toys, like “Lobster” (2003) and “Dolphin” (2002), hurled as projectiles. Naturally, a Koons Balloon Dog, his most readily recognizable work, receives top billing.The scene’s version of Vulture, grappling here with one of the multiverse’s many Spider-Men, appears as if lifted out of a Leonardo da Vinci drawing.Sony Pictures Animation“When we talked about the Balloon Dog we said, ‘What could we do with it? What would be special?’” Thompson told me. Koons, he recalled, “was actually the one who said, ‘You know, one thing about the Balloon Dog is it’s this thing that has a lot to do with breath. It’s filled with human breath. But we’ve never actually seen the inside of one. What if we cut one open and we could see what was inside?’ And we just kind of looked at each other, like, ‘But what’s inside?’ And he said, ‘Whatever you want.’”What’s inside ended up being a sight gag that follows after Vulture lops off the head of a 12-foot-tall Balloon Dog, from which spill countless smaller Balloon Dog sculptures, satisfying the nagging suspicion that Koons’s outsize works are in fact elaborate piñatas. (The scene brought to mind an episode earlier this year, where a collector visiting the Art Wynwood fair in Miami accidentally shattered a 16-inch edition. The film was already well through production.)“It was moving to me,” Koons said on a phone call from Hydra, Greece, “because I always thought of the Balloon Dog as kind of a ritualistic work, something that could have a mythic quality to it, a little bit like a Trojan horse or Venus of Willendorf, where there would be some form of tribal community.” (His own balloon Venus did not seem to make the final cut.) Koons considered the Balloon Dog’s presence in the film as “truly participating in a larger community where people can rally around it.”Spider-Woman joining the fray during the Guggenheim battle. In our own universe, the Jeff Koons retrospective took place at the Whitney.Sony Pictures AnimationThe scene, which also features several of Koons’s earlier, stranger and less exposed works, like the polychromed wood sculpture “String of Puppies” (1988), from the “Banality” series, the stainless steel bust “Louis XIV” (1986), and several of his 1980s vacuum cleaner assemblages, is a homage to an artist who served as the original, if indirect, influence for the first “Spider-Verse” film’s direction. In 2014, while still in an early conceptual phase and at an impasse as to how to create a kind of postmodern version of the deathless hero, Phil Lord, a co-writer of the screenplay, and Christopher Miller, a producer, visited the Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Lord has said the exhibition crystallized their thinking.“You could look at ‘The New,’ ‘Equilibrium,’ ‘Luxury & Degradation,’ ‘Antiquity,’ ‘Hulk Elvis,’ all different bodies of work that possibly seem like this kind of multiverse,” Koons offered. “Where you could have things existing at the same time but in different ways.”Whether the deep dive into Koons’s oeuvre resonates with casual viewers is another story. As the plot swings between slightly overbearing teen angst and extrapolations into quantum physics — itself an extended metaphor for the angst-inducing, open-ended possibilities of adolescence — the art in-jokes feel like a concession to adult aesthetes. (“I think it’s a Banksy” is a one-liner recycled from the first film, referring to something that looks nothing like a Banksy. Everyone laughed at the joke at the Upper West Side screening I attended, but not at the Koons stuff.)Spider-Man and Spider-Woman in a quiet moment. The film’s animated images often speed by at a dizzying clip.Sony Pictures AnimationThe idea that, in an alternative universe, Jeff Koons’s career booster took place at the Guggenheim instead of the Whitney is perhaps the most in-joke of them all, something even seasoned art-world insiders might not have fully appreciated. “There was a discussion for many years that I would have my retrospective at the Guggenheim — it never happened,” Koons told me. “So it was wonderful to see.”For his part, Koons gushed about the result: “I think the film is really astonishing, and I think culturally it’s playing a very important role for a whole generation of young people to inform them about the possibilities of perception.” He went on to say, “I never had seen richer colors — the reds are phenomenal!” Koons was born in ’55 and grew up on Disney. “There was a certain point in the ’70s maybe where we saw animation fall off,” he said, “and then with Pixar we saw this tremendous leap forward. The film uses that technology as a base but brings back a texture, really the texture of the senses. I mean, it’s like the way we perceive a Rembrandt or a Titian.”Asked if he was at all disturbed by seeing representations of his work obliterated by animated superheroes, Koons responded with Zen Buddhist diplomacy. “I care very much about the world. I care about living. I care about existence,” he said. “Everything turns to dust. The world around us turns to dust, universes turn to dust. What’s important is how we can enjoy the world that we’re in, and be able to have the perception of what our future can be. As an artist, it’s nice to feel in some way that the fine arts are able to participate within culture.” More

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      ‘Transformers’ Statues Cause a Big Fight in Georgetown

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      A professor decorated a sidewalk in Georgetown with 10-foot sculptures of Bumblebee and Optimus Prime. The well-heeled locals were not pleased.The thing about putting a pair of 10-foot statues of metal-hewn Transformers outside your townhouse in the most picturesque district of the nation’s capital is that the neighbors are going to have opinions.And on Prospect Street in Georgetown, they were not pleased.The statues — Bumblebee and Optimus Prime, two of the good guys from the long-running “Transformers” movie franchise — appeared in January 2021 outside the white-brick home of Newton Howard, a cognitive scientist and machine-learning expert with ties to the intelligence community.He had ordered them from a factory in Taiwan to the tune of more than $25,000 each. Where large brick planters had once blended in with the local aesthetic, there was now something akin to outsider art by way of an anonymous welder and Hollywood’s reinterpretation of 1980s toys.Plenty of people love the statues, which resemble invaders from the future, in a neighborhood that does its best to hang on to its cobblestone past. Students at nearby Georgetown University can’t get enough. Neither can tourists: The Transformers statues have their own entry on Google Maps as a place of interest, with 4.9 stars. “The best part of visiting Georgetown,” one reviewer declared.“People are at my door every day,” Dr. Howard, 53, said at his home on a recent afternoon. “It doesn’t bother me. I find it to be beautiful that actually people are appreciating things.”But some of his neighbors are less enthusiastic, and the critics of his notion of a Georgetown-appropriate sidewalk display have been trying to get rid of Bumblebee and Optimus Prime for more than two years.Dr. Howard, a bald man with an unplaceable accent, wears dark round eyeglasses that come equipped with a camera and a microprocessor that allows him to translate languages on the spot, he said.He paid $3.75 million for the townhouse and moved in during the pandemic. In 2021, he snapped up the one next door for $4.8 million. The homes lie close to his job at Georgetown University School of Medicine, where he is a research professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular and cellular biology. (He added to his real estate holdings in 2022, when he bought a $3.6 million home in Potomac, Md. It has 14 bathrooms and a bocce court.)Dr. Howard greeting tourists who stopped by to see his Transformers sculptures.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesPutting up the Transformers wasn’t the only thing Dr. Howard did to irritate his Georgetown neighbors, who learned shortly after his arrival that he wasn’t some sort of shabby, retiring professor. He had flashy taste and he liked to show it off, parking a number of expensive cars on Prospect Street: a yellow McClaren 720S (new ones start at $310,000), a 2005 Porsche Carrera GT (which goes for $1.4 million and up), a Porsche 918 (fewer than 1000 were made, and they go for well over $1 million). Not to mention an MRAP tank and a small airplane from his collection that he once parked in front of his home. The car show came to a stop only after he received complaints.A rich guy with loud cars is one thing, a known story. The Transformers were something else altogether. They quickly became a flashpoint in Georgetown, and on the internet, after the local news site DCist reported on the efforts of Dr. Howard’s neighbors to get the statues removed.Sally Quinn, the author and longtime Georgetown resident, said she was firmly in the anti-Transformers camp. “I think they’re really ugly,” she said. “Some people may like them. You know, everybody’s taste in art is different. But that’s not the point.”The point, she continued, was historical preservation: “People come to Georgetown because it’s Georgetown. It’s a beautiful, quaint village.”But the author Kitty Kelley, who said she has lived in the neighborhood for “two husbands,” or since 1977, sent Dr. Howard a handwritten card in support of his sidewalk flair.“All you have to do is take a walk through Georgetown, and you’re going to see gnomes and wrought-iron benches,” said Ms. Kelley, who is known for her dishy biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (“Jackie Oh!”), Oprah and Nancy Reagan. “You’ll see cement lions of all sizes. So why should this man be deprived of using the space right outside his front door?”“Maybe it isn’t Picasso,” she continued. “It isn’t a sculpture by Degas, but I think he’s entitled.”Ms. Kelley noted that her own outdoor decorations have included topiary monkeys, a seven-foot bird feeder and “an angel who’s shooting something across the yard.”So: Was Dr. Howard a champion of free expression who found himself on a crusade against exclusionary zoning and “snooty neighbors,” as Slate cast him? Or was he an attention-seeking scofflaw with questionable taste?Or maybe this was simply a case of an eccentric and mysteriously rich guy being eccentric and mysteriously rich.Optimus Prime, a Transformers statue in front of Dr. Howard’s home, with flowers in its hand.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesNeighbors Weigh InGeorgetown is not the most futuristic place. Some of the streets still have cobblestone and the remains of streetcar tracks. The neighborhood is filled with pastel rowhouses from the 18th and 19th centuries and with newer homes meant to recall the older structures.The area also has its share of stately brick mansions that make you wonder who lives there, or used to. Often, it’s someone well-off, but occasionally it’s a someone someone. Power players in media, politics and entertainment — like Madeleine Albright, Ben Bradlee, Katherine Graham, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Elizabeth Taylor — have called Georgetown home. But it wasn’t always Washington’s glamour spot.“Georgetown was kind of a dump in the early 20th century,” said George Derek Musgrove, the co-author of the 2017 study “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.”The old houses had largely fallen into disrepair, and the neighborhood was home to working-class Irish and African Americans. Then, with the explosion of government hiring during the New Deal, Ivy League graduates moved in. They fixed up their homes in an array of styles until the national craze for historical preservation took hold. In 1950, “Old Georgetown” was designated a federal historic district, with all the restrictions on home modification that entailed.“By the time you get to 1960, and John Kennedy leaves his Georgetown mansion on N Street for the White House, you just couldn’t afford to get in if you wanted to,” Mr. Musgrove said.A lot of the residents support efforts to keep things more or less the same. Catherine Emmerson, whose family lives close to Dr. Howard, helped start the Prospect Street Citizens’ Association a few years ago to stop a condo conversion that would have blocked local residents’ views of the Potomac River. When the Transformers arrived, the group had a new target.It’s not that the association was against celebrating film history. In fact, its members argued that the condo conversion would have threatened something that ought to be a landmark (and now is): a set of steep steps on Prospect Street, built in 1895, that appeared in “The Exorcist.” (Think: tumbling priest.)But that was “The Exorcist.” A film. (Maybe?) An old movie, at least. The “Transformers” franchise, which has grossed more than $5 billion across six films, was more like … I.P. (Michael Bay, the “Transformers” producer, declined to comment on Dr. Howard’s decorating choices or the neighbors’ reaction.)And the Citizens’ Association had clear recourse. Before putting up the statues, Dr. Howard did not apply for any kind of permit, despite Georgetown’s historic status and the fact that the sidewalk is public space.There is a process, a local official emphasized when he appeared in front of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission via video in March 2021, three months after Bumblebee and Optimus Prime had become part of the neighborhood. And he had bypassed it entirely.The commission went on to inform him that, before gaining approval, he would have to apply to something else: the Old Georgetown Board, a federal body of three architects that ruled on any changes to the exteriors of properties.Ms. Emmerson and another neighbor, the author and former television journalist Luke Russert, also weighed in. Ms. Emmerson argued that the statues represented a safety hazard and drew crowds of disruptive gawkers. (Dr. Howard later had his Transformers bolted in place.)An Optimus Prime statue watches over the neighborhood from Dr. Howard’s rooftop.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesMr. Russert was more blunt. “What’s to stop someone from putting up a statue of Joseph Stalin and saying, well, this is provocative, it’s art, it speaks to me?” he argued. “They are a nuisance, they are an eyesore, and they detract from the spirit of the neighborhood.”As tensions continued, Dr. Howard said he started hearing two terms that he had never heard before — NIMBY and YIMBY. (“Not in my backyard” vs. “Yes in my backyard.”) The pro-development crowd wanted to claim him as a hero. He declined to ally himself, exactly. Instead, Dr. Howard argued, his statues were all about “the American idea,” because they welcomed visitors to a cloistered part of the city.“You don’t want to just come up with ways to shut down your neighborhood so nobody comes into it,” he said.His critics disputed the notion that he was motivated by an idea of civic good. “His repeated disregard for the law and procedure tells a story of someone who is not operating in good faith for the collective community,” Ms. Emmerson wrote in an email to The New York Times.‘The Real Tony Stark’There was no horde outside Dr. Howard’s townhouse on a recent Sunday afternoon. A young man paused to snap a photo of his 2-year-old son standing with the statues. The toddler’s blue and yellow shoes matched Optimus Prime’s color scheme.From the rooftop, a six-foot Optimus Prime statue peeked down at the street. It had once stood at the front door, but after the initial controversy Dr. Howard commissioned a taller version for the sidewalk. Then he moved the original, perched as if part of some SWAT team on the lookout for any Decepticons.The interior of Dr. Howard’s home, which he said he decorated himself, resembled a lair. The glassy back of the townhouse overlooks the Potomac, where the buzz of jets headed into and out of Reagan National Airport adds to the techno-paradise vibe. Motorcycles were parked in the living areas as objets, and five more Transformer statues stood guard. There was also a giant model of Iron Man, a Marvel superhero dear to Dr. Howard.“A lot of people used to call me the real Tony Stark,” he said, referring to Iron Man’s alter ego.The interior of Dr. Howard’s Georgetown home includes motorcycles and more Transformers sculptures.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesThe memorabilia on display included his concealed carry permit, as well as framed photographs of him with Bill Clinton and Tim Tebow, the former N.F.L. quarterback who became known for kneeling in prayer on the field. Dr. Howard, who said he is a follower of Messianic Judaism, a religion sometimes referred to colloquially as Jews for Jesus, said that he and Mr. Tebow belong to the same fellowship group. (Mr. Tebow couldn’t be reached for comment.)His home was fastidious, except for a half-built child’s toy in the living room. Dr. Howard has four children, ranging in age from 5 to 26, he said. (The older children are from a previous marriage.) He and his wife, Rebecca, are also fostering five Afghan refugees, he added.Senator Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, became friends with Dr. Howard through a shared interest in Afghanistan.“I call him Tony Stark,” he said. “I would have called him that without the statue.” (Senator Mullin made a splash in 2021 for personally trying to escort Americans out of Afghanistan after Kabul fell to the Taliban, against the explicit wishes of the State and Defense Departments. Dr. Howard was “very involved” in similar efforts, Senator Mullin said.)The professor — who is, duh, a fan of the “Transformers” movies — said the sculptures had a deeper meaning for him. Not only did they represent machines and humans coexisting in harmony, he said, but the word “transform” had a great deal of personal significance.“I like changing things when you’re in a status quo and they’re wrong,” he said. “When one looks at themselves and feels self-pity and falls into dwellings of darkness, you should transform.”Dr. Howard has gone through several transformations himself. He was born in the Sinai Peninsula when Israel controlled it. His family — Egyptian Jews who ended up living in France, he said — moved to the United States when he was 11.He said he joined the Army at 18, then worked as a linguist in Michigan “across various agencies,” specializing in Arabic, Farsi and Dari. He changed his name around that time because, he said, “it was offered by an agency.” He declined to provide more detail.“There’s a lot of things during that phase of my career that should be kept secret,” he said.Dr. Howard — whose doctorates include concentrations in mathematics and neuroscience, and who holds an appointment at the University of Oxford alongside the one at Georgetown — is a curious mix of limelight-seeking and discreet. After college, he said, he worked in military intelligence. He later did work for InQTel, which is functionally the C.I.A.’s venture capital fund.What precisely he did to get rich is unclear. He said his wealth resulted from selling various businesses, some of which he could not talk about. The walls of his townhouse are filled with commemorative plaques of his patents, many of which have defense industry applications, including “Wireless Network for Routing a Signal Without Using a Tower” and “System and Method for Automated Detection of Situational Awareness.”A tabletop Transformer in Dr. Howard’s townhouse beside a couple upright books.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesHe said he suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2000 while delivering medical supplies, though he declined to offer more detail. After his recovery, he decided to focus on applying the principles of machine learning to the human brain, and turned to neuroscience. “I figured instead of sitting and getting my brain worked on, I would work on it myself by studying it,” he said.His ventures include Aiberry, a start-up that tries to use A.I. analysis to improve on mental health screening. He said he hoped to help solve the problem of degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s with a cloud-connected device implanted in the brain, using A.I. to optimize the levels of deep brain stimulation.In other words, he would like to help human beings preserve their humanity by becoming a little more machine.The RulingThe Old Georgetown Board seems to rule with an iron fist — just try putting up a neon sign in the neighborhood — but its power is advisory. The city of Washington, D.C., has the real authority to enforce decisions, but the influence of neighbors complaining in unison cannot be discounted.Topher Mathews, a commissioner for Georgetown’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission, said that the Transformers mess wouldn’t even make his top five neighborhood dramas of the past 10 years. Easily outstripping it, for instance, was the agita caused over the opening on O Street of Call Your Mother Deli, which attracts long lines.And locals love to bring up the Tree Incident of 2018, which involved a new homeowner’s decision to prune and cut down magnolia trees on his property, which happened to be the former home of Ms. Onassis. In response, a neighbor created a Halloween display with a mock tombstone reading, “Beloved magnolia 1840-2018 destroyed R.I.P.,” and a grim reaper that announced “Tree Killer Lives There.”Dr. Howard has argued that his statues constitute meaningful public art. The “Transformers” movies follow a classic good-versus-evil struggle in which the Autobots (the good guys) work to save humanity from the Decepticons (the bad guys). Reviewing the first installment of the franchise in 2007, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that it was “part car commercial, part military recruitment ad, a bumper-to-bumper pileup of big cars, big guns and, as befits its recently weaned target demographic, big breasts.” The Old Georgetown Board took up the matter of Dr. Howard’s statues in spring 2021, and the city gave him a six-month permit to keep them up. But well after the six months was up, Bumblebee and Optimus Prime were still in place.Dr. Newton Howard shows off a device that he says will use A.I. to optimize and adjust the levels of deep brain stimulation.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesBy the time the board met again, in April 2023, Dr. Howard claimed that he had spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting to keep his statues up, an amount that included legal and architect advisory fees and city fines.This time, the board ordered him to take the statues down. Instead of complying, Dr. Howard appealed to the D.C. Public Space Committee. He also rebuffed offers from the Advisory Neighborhood Commission to help him find another place in the neighborhood to display his statues.Dr. Howard seems to enjoy the attention that has come with the ongoing case. He has talked extensively with the press about his crusade. He was flattered that Paramount, the studio behind the Transformers movie, had invited him to the Washington premiere of the next installment, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” which comes out June 9.As DCist and The Washington Post chronicled the twists and turns of the neighborhood drama, sentiment online seemed to swing his way. A student at Georgetown University started a Change.org petition, signed by more than 900 people, to keep the statues up. “This is so dumb,” Hayden Gise, an Advisory Neighborhood Commission vice chair who lives in a neighborhood close to Georgetown, wrote on Twitter. “Let him live oh my god. Everyone loves property rights until some guy does something cool.”On May 25, the statues’ fate went before the Public Space Committee. Dr. Howard had hired Paul Strauss, D.C.’s shadow senator, to represent him. Or, as Mr. Strauss put it, he was acting as counsel for Optimus Prime, while a colleague represented Bumblebee.“People have misunderstood the issue,” Mr. Strauss said. “You talk about compatibility with a historic district? Technically, these guys are millennia old. I mean, they’re prehistoric.”Mr. Strauss and Dr. Howard also persuaded Peter Cullen and Dan Gilvezan, actors who voiced Optimus Prime and Bumblebee on the 1980s cartoon series based on the toys, to attest at the hearing about the history and significance of the nearly 40-year franchise.The entreaties didn’t work. The D.C. Public Space Committee denied Dr. Howard a permit, meaning that he would have to take the statues down himself, or the city would. It wasn’t a question of art; it was a question of following the rules.Dr. Howard didn’t seem inclined to stand down. Before the meeting, he suggested that he would appeal a ruling against him on First Amendment grounds. His lawyer clarified that they saw the issue as one of equal protection: Plenty of people fill their sidewalk planters in Georgetown and never get dinged for it. Why is his client required to seek a permit for what is in his planter?After the meeting, Dr. Howard said he thought he would apply for a new permit. But he seemed deflated.“I’m sad,” he said in a text to a reporter, adding,“What do you think I should do?”The victory that Dr. Howard said he was seeking was a moral one.“I know what these Transformers mean to me,” he said. “What does it mean to them?”As of June 1, the statues were still standing.Kitty Bennett contributed research. More

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      Matthew Barney, Back in the Game

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      The hit, 45 years ago, shook up the world of football. Then, just as quickly, people moved on. But not Darryl Stingley, the receiver for the New England Patriots who bore the head-on charge by Jack Tatum of the Oakland Raiders. Stingley was rendered quadriplegic. Tatum, a defender known as “The Assassin,” notoriously never apologized.The artist Matthew Barney was an 11-year-old in Idaho at the time and remembers the incident from constant slow-motion replays on television. He was just getting into the sport seriously himself, and the Tatum-Stingley collision, though shocking, didn’t stop him. Violence was inculcated in football training, he recalled. It was also addictive.“That was my gateway, feeling that blow to the head and what that feels like in your body,” Barney said in an interview in March while editing “Secondary,” his new five-channel video installation that takes that 1978 event as its point of departure. He relished practice drills where he and other boys were ordered to slam into each other at top speed, he said. “You’d walk away, and you’re seeing stars.”Barney became an elite high-school quarterback, but he changed course during his years at Yale University, emerging from there in 1989 into the New York art world, where he found near-instant success. Physical duress was immediately salient in his work, from the “Drawing Restraint” projects in which, for instance, he would harness himself and move along a gallery’s walls and ceiling, attempting to draw on the wall.Football served as a prompt in the “Jim Otto Suite,” which Barney made in 1991-92, one of the early works that established his distinctive approach to combining performance, video and sculpture. Its inspiration was Otto, a Raiders player whose numerous injuries led his body to be loaded with prosthetic materials. Otto’s story collapsed resilience and destruction, and artistically opened performance and sculpture horizons.Ted Johnson, left, and Wally Cardona in “Secondary.”via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesBut the sport itself would recede in Barney’s work, engulfed by countless other themes — sexual differentiation, reincarnation, cars, sewers and excrement, among many others — and the epic scale and baroque staging of his “Cremaster Cycle” (1994-2002) and “River of Fundament” (2014) films. (Metrograph, a movie theater in Manhattan, is showing the “Cremaster” films this month and next.)With “Secondary,” which is open through June 25, Barney is tugging at a loose end that goes back to his childhood. From a place of physical and intellectual maturity, he’s scrutinizing a sport — and a country, because football is quintessentially American — that may or may not have changed. Now 56, he is taking stock of himself and an uneasy nation.“There’s a way that the violence in our culture has become so exposed everywhere you look,” he said. “I think my relationship to that legacy is by way of my experience on the football field. I wanted to make a piece that looks at that, in more ways than one.”The new work is concise for Barney. It runs one hour, the clock time of a football game. Six performers, out of a principal cast of 11, enact the roles of players in the 1978 game, including Barney as Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. It was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, near the East River. And it is showing to the public now in that very venue — his final use of the space before he moves to a nearby facility.Last fall and winter, the studio served as a simulated football field, a movement lab and a film set. When I visited, the principal performers — including David Thomson, who plays Stingley and is the project’s movement director, and Raphael Xavier, as Tatum — were running through some of the episodes that tell the story abstractly, in an indirect sequence.“I’m not trying to be Stingley, a person I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a moment,” said David Thomson, left, who plays the former Patriots receiver in “Secondary,” while Barney, right, plays Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. Camila Falquez for The New York TimesThere were weird things going on, too. Additional performers around the sideline wore the all-black costumes of devoted Raiders fans, walking around like camp horror figures; some were actors, but others were members of the Raiders’ New York City fan club. Some were being filmed inside a trench that was dug into the studio floor, exposing pipes, dirt and water.An artist’s studio, Barney said, has traits of the stadium. “It’s kind of the organizing body for this story,” he said, adding: “I wanted my working space to be a character.”Digging the trench, he said, revealed decaying pipes and how the tide floods and recedes under the buildings. “I wanted that infrastructure to be exposed, both as a manifestation of the broken spine of Stingley, but also as crumbling infrastructure within my studio, within the city of New York,” he said.For all its allusions, “Secondary” — the title refers to the back line of defenders on the football field, cornerbacks and safeties whose job is to shadow the wide receivers and break up any passing play — holds to the Tatum-Stingley incident as its narrative and moral core.Stingley, right, was left paralyzed after Tatum hit him in a 1978 game.Ron Riesterer/Sporting News, via Getty ImagesIt is rich and also tragic material. Stingley died in 2007 at 55; Tatum, 61, died three years later. All his life after the hit, Stingley wanted an apology that never came. Tatum argued that the hit was just part of the job, even if he also boasted that his style of play pushed the line. Since then a flood of research has confirmed the sport’s toll. Stabler, whom Barney plays in “Secondary,” contributed to this knowledge posthumously when his brain was found to show advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E.I asked if Barney, the former quarterback, had come to worry about his own health. “Honestly, yeah,” he said. He was glad, he added, that he stopped playing when he did.“Secondary” has a staccato format, amplified by its staging: A jumbotron-like overhead device shows one video channel on three screens, while four other channels run on monitors around the studio. The hit is evoked early, but much of the subsequent action returns to buildup — players warming up, fans getting hyped. The play sequences make up roughly the final third.“Secondary” was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, and it is now on view to the public there.Camila Falquez for The New York TimesThe point was never a literal treatment, said Thomson, the movement director and Barney’s close collaborator on the project. “This isn’t a docudrama,” he said. “I’m not trying to be Stingley, a person I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a moment.”Still, Thomson said, from studying the real-life athletes, he distilled traits that informed how he worked with the actors who portray them. Stingley, he said, was earnest. Tatum, angry. Grogan, technical. Each trait, he said, became “a touchstone one goes back to without too many flourishes, and see what resonates from that place.”In their research, Barney and Thomson read Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of football highlights and practice reels. Video of the hit — which came in a preseason game, with no competitive stakes — is grainy and sparse. The camera follows the ball past Stingley’s outstretched arms, so that the hit takes place at the edge of the frame. There were not dozens of camera angles available like today.David Thomson holds Ted Johnson aloft in a scene from “Secondary.” Play sequences make up roughly the final third of the video.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesIn their research, Barney and David Thomson, the project’s movement director, read Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of football footage.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesThis opened space for improvisation, and for Barney to introduce sculptural props that the players negotiate. (Barney has always stated he is a sculptor first and plans for these works to be shown in future exhibitions.)Xavier, the dancer who plays Tatum, had to contend with a pile of wet clay dumbbells that distended and broke as he carried them. “I’ve worked with props before, but they were solid,” he said. “But the clay was alive.” It forced him, he said, to locate vulnerability, even tenderness, inside a character that he remembered from his own childhood as an aggressive, even mean, football player.Indeed, the core players in “Secondary” are middle-aged men negotiating the memory of the culture they grew up in — and of their own bodies. Even stylized, the football movements involved in the piece are not instinctive or easy ones for men in their 50s and 60s.Barney “particularly wanted older bodies, which I appreciated,” Thomson said. “What are the limitations that those bodies hold that may have a different resonance, a different visual narrative?”But “Secondary” enfolds other perspectives as it gestures toward a broader, contemporary American social landscape. The referees are a mixed-gender crew. Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a composer, experimental vocalist and member of the San Carlos Apache Nation, delivers an extremely deconstructed version of the national anthem.Jacquelyn Deshchidn, center, is featured in “Secondary,” flanked by, from left, Jeffrey Gavett, Kyoko Kitamura and Isabel Crespo Pardo, who play referees in the video.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta Cervantes“As an Indigenous person, it was something that I was excited to take on,” Deshchidn said. They became drawn, too, to the work’s environmental aspect, spending breaks on set staring into the damp trench. “It brought up imagery of bones and burial, and repatriation work — the way there are institutions truly built on top of our bones.”Barney is an art-world celebrity (whose fame only grew during his more than decade-long relationship with the Icelandic pop artist Björk), but he prefers a low profile. On set, he cut a workaday presence with his close-shaven look under a cap. Performers in “Secondary” said his work ethic was intense but his manner open. While some people on the project are his longtime collaborators, like the composer Jonathan Bepler, many are new to his world.There is a sense with “Secondary” that Barney is turning a page — certainly with the studio move, after some 15 years at that site, but in some private way, too. When I asked if he was feeling his age — our age, as we are contemporaries — he said yes.“Letting go of being a young person is a big relief,” Barney said.Camila Falquez for The New York Times“In a good way,” he added. “Letting go of being a young person is a big relief.”Compared with his earlier work, “Secondary” strikes a more concise and collaborative note. “It’s more connected to the world,” he said. “It’s a piece that’s thinking through the environment within which it was made. In my 20s, I was trying to figure out ways of assigning a material language for what was inside me. This piece is different that way.”“Secondary” may take its cue from 1978 and invite its players into a kind of memory work through their bodies — but the work’s structure, with its emphasis on the buildup to the bad thing everyone knows is coming, energizes it with premonition.It ends in an elegiac vein, the final shots widening to the city. “It felt crucial to pan away from the specific to the general,” Barney said. “As much as the studio is a kind of micro frame, there’s a larger one that is the city and country that we live in. I want there to be some kind of legibility to read those different scales — for them all to be in there.” More

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      A Sibling Rivalry Divides Harry Bertoia’s Legacy

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      Celia Bertoia’s father — the famous sculptor and not-so-famous musician Harry Bertoia — had been dead 30 years when she asked a psychic how to handle his legacy.The youngest of three children, she had long seemed to be her father’s favorite: a confidante who, as a child, would cut his hair outdoors on their forest-fronting property among the idyllic valleys of Eastern Pennsylvania. But after his death in 1978, she dodged the family business of welding together mountains of metal into behemoth public-art installations and “sounding sculptures” that made music. She became a real-estate agent in Colorado, then the owner of a Montana service that provided timing for road races.When she entered her 50s, Celia decided it was time to help manage the thousands of pieces her father had left. Her mother, Brigitta Valentiner Bertoia, had died in 2007. The next year, Celia consulted the psychic, who, knowing none of the back story, described “beautiful papers with abstract designs” — which Celia took as a reference to her father’s monotypes — and his lung cancer.Harry Bertoia is buried near the barn that houses his sounding sculptures, and under his biggest gong.Aaron Richter for The New York Times“She said: ‘The world is ready for these now. You should get these out,’” Celia, now 68, recalled in a phone conversation from the Utah office park that houses the Harry Bertoia Foundation, the nonprofit she started in 2013. “She gave me the direction.”Following the psychic’s guidance reignited the childhood rivalry between Celia and her older brother, Val, who had spent much of the previous three decades restoring, appraising and emulating his father’s sculptures in the workshop Harry established in 1952. Accusations of theft, forgery, avarice and betrayal erupted, prompting a bitter three-year lawsuit that led, in 2016, to the division of Bertoia’s most fabled work: a centuries-old stone barn stuffed with nearly 100 of his so-called Sonambients, intricate but austere sculptures he welded from rods of beryllium copper and played like a virtuoso.Many families struggle with issues of inheritance. But during the last decade, the Bertoias have learned how complicated those issues can be when that inheritance is unique.“When I first heard the sculptures, I went, ‘Wow, what is that?’ Their suppleness is so inviting,” said the composer Mark Grey, who captured their sounds with a mobile studio in 2002 to build simulacrums for the Kronos Quartet. “His sculptures leapfrog electronic music technology to create a different window into what we think sound is.”In late 2021, Sotheby’s auctioned 20 of Bertoia’s Sonambients (a rough portmanteau of sound and ambient) for nearly $6 million, prices that were in some cases ten times their estimates. Then Jack White’s Third Man Records reissued the 11 rare LPs Bertoia had recorded in the barn — recursive chimes that linger like church bells, powerful drones that roar like doom metal, tapped gongs that sing like seraphic choirs. The first pressing sold out in days. Last year, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas hosted the first domestic Bertoia retrospective in nearly half a century. There, musicians including Nels Cline and Craig Taborn played the Sonambients in a series of concerts.Those events were all partnerships with the foundation, part of Celia’s efforts to send her father’s work out into the world. Val, though, hopes to bring the world to the work. As children, they fought, and as adults, they have competing visions of their father’s legacy.“Celia and Val have the utmost respect for Harry,” Lesta Bertoia, the oldest sibling, who excused herself from the lawsuit, said in an interview. “But they have never had good communication. Now they can make up one another’s motives.”Val Bertoia with Melissa Strawser, his partner, at the Bertoia barn. Aaron Richter for The New York TimesTHE MORNING AFTER the Sotheby’s auction, 100 miles southwest of Manhattan at the family home in rural Pennsylvania, Val Bertoia bounded around what he called the “Sonambient Barn” with a devilish grin. He swatted and swiped row after row of musical sculptures ­— half of them made by his father, half by his own hand. The place shook with tectonic power, long southerly windows buzzing like beehives. His longtime partner, the artist Melissa Strawser, beamed.The Bertoia family arrived in tiny Bally, Pa., at the dawn of the 1950s. Harry was an accomplished jewelry and furniture designer who had worked with Charles and Ray Eames. He’d taken a job at the modern design bastion Knoll, where he developed the celebrated Diamond chair. Then the sound of a bending wire captured his attention and fired his imagination.An archival photograph of Harry Bertoia with his sculptures, and at left, a mallet used to activate them.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesBertoia’s grave in Pennsylvania.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesDuring his final 20 years, Bertoia developed an army of minimalist sculptures with long rods that waved like fields of grain, producing tidal washes of luminous overtones or pointillist symphonies. He added a second floor to the hay barn, where his desk remains; the rest of the barn functioned as a giant resonant chamber, filled with a rotating cast of 100 sculptures.“Being in the presence of those sounds brought me into a different world,” Celia said. “He would move around the room like a cat. He knew those sculptures better than he knew his family.”Val began working for his father at his sprawling, cluttered shop in the center of Bally in 1971. Their relationship was sometimes strained, but Val said he internalized his father’s methods. “Harry was my idol, my hero, my superman,” he said.After his father’s death, Val tended to the business. He continued making sounding sculptures, incorporating whimsy, a quality he felt his father had shunned, and numbering every piece sequentially. (After 45 years, he is nearing 2,700.) Harry Bertoia acolytes accused Val of being a charlatan who plagiarized, charged for tours and inflated appraisals.“I realized I could not replace Harry Bertoia,” Val, now 73, said. “I had my own personality and discoveries.”Harry Bertoia’s sounding sculptures are also housed at the foundation that bears his name in St. George, Utah.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesThis loose arrangement seemed to work until Celia launched her foundation. She’d been away from the sculptures for so long that she asked to shadow Val for two weeks, to get reacquainted with their dynamics and his own work. He agreed, then demanded $10,000; he admitted this was to scare her off. When Celia mentioned a few sculptures she’d requested years earlier, Val said they were gone. He’d split the proceeds only with Lesta, the sister who lived nearby. Celia hired a lawyer, battling Val over what belonged where until they settled in 2016.Celia and Lesta received 73 of the remaining 92 Sonambients. Val kept the barn, their childhood home, the workshop, and the other 19 sounding sculptures. Val described the day he spent crating his father’s sculptures as “emotionally swirling, like a hurricane.” For Celia, it was “a knife in the belly.” Lesta watched from the sidelines, telling them they were again behaving like children.A DECADE AGO, Bertoia’s musical legacy found an unexpected champion. John Brien is the owner of Important Records, a Massachusetts-based label that had documented the experimental recesses of international musical scenes for a dozen years, like harsh noise from Japan and New Zealand and graceful drones from England and Australia. He knew of Bertoia’s chairs and even kept a photo of the designer above his desk. He was embarrassed when he stumbled on a link to Bertoia’s music in 2012; how had he missed it?“There was nothing I could compare it to,” Brien said. “I wanted to know as much as I could.”Brien pitched the idea of a box set to the Bertoias, who consented despite the lawsuit. He began visiting the barn, where Harry’s Sony microphones still hung, to collect photos, slides and sketches. Released in 2016, the 11-disc “Sonambient” was the first compilation of Harry’s albums.Brien has since emerged as one of Bertoia’s most steadfast advocates, restoring and converting nearly 200 hours of unheard tape of music made on the sculptures. He has unearthed novel techniques within those recordings, including a primitive form of overdubbing. Brien said he can now identify several sculptures by sound alone.Amid the turmoil, Brien strove to be inclusive. He solicited essays from all three children. The art historian Beverly Twitchell, who organized Bertoia’s first two exhibitions while he was alive and wrote a definitive biography, contributed archival photos and guided Brien beyond the drama. And when the much-larger Third Man suggested partnering on a vinyl edition, defraying the massive cost of pressing such a large set, he agreed.“I wanted to reach a new audience unfamiliar with this music,” said Brien. “This was the way.”Celia Bertoia, the artist’s younger daughter, at the foundation.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesBrien’s work suggests an ideal path forward for the Bertoia family — partnerships, not divisions. But Celia and Val still seem hesitant to share resources, even while mounting exhaustive projects to document their father’s work.“Celia’s goal is to gain money, where I have the goal of gaining people,” Val said. (According to financial records, Celia has not drawn a salary as the foundation’s executive director for several years.) “We have two different directions — the foundation and the ‘Soundation.’ The Soundation is about how people can feel healed.”For five years, and with the help of Sotheby’s, the foundation worked to sell 60 of Celia and Lesta’s 73 Sonambients to a museum willing to build a new barn. Practicalities quashed the plan. Celia is now focused on a catalogue raisonné, a complete accounting of Harry’s work. That’s difficult to accomplish for an artist who never signed his creations, and harder still when a feud makes some of the pieces untouchable.“The catalog will survive far beyond any of the siblings,” she said. “It will ensure Harry’s work will live on.”Bertoia’s works at the foundation in Utah, which operates separately from Val Bertoia’s collection in Pennsylvania.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesVal has filled the half-empty barn with sounding sculptures of his own, opposite his father’s remaining Sonambients. Moving among them, he raved about the possibilities of what he called “the metaverse” — an augmented-reality program that will allow anyone to visit the barn virtually and play. Brien had once floated the idea, but Val and Strawser pursued it when the pandemic shuttered in-person tours.Grey, the composer, has started developing the program. It is not a question of technology, he insisted, but funding. “To see the barn in all its glory — the microphones hanging off rafters, cobwebs all over them — was remarkable, but time moves on,” Grey said. “We have the opportunity to keep this art alive.”When Twitchell, the Bertoia biographer, learned the barn’s contents would be scattered, she was sad. But practical considerations offset her disappointment. The aging barn has no security system or fire sprinklers, little parking or insurance. Even if the instruments are no longer in the same place, she said, they will at least survive.“Harry would like the idea of multiple approaches to his work,” Twitchell said. “No one would say ‘this is the only way to think about this stuff.’” More

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      Lorraine Hansberry Statue to Be Unveiled in Times Square

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      A life-size likeness of the pioneering playwright will be unveiled in June as part of a new initiative to honor her legacy.When the Los Angeles-based artist Alison Saar was commissioned a little over four years ago to sculpt a statue of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, she had just one thought: “Am I the right person for the job?”“I don’t really work with likenesses,” said Saar, 66, whose artwork focuses on the African diaspora and Black female identity. “But they said, ‘No, no, we want it to be more of a portrait of her passion and who she was beyond a playwright.’”The request had come from Lynn Nottage, the two-time Pulitzer-winning playwright, as part of an initiative she was developing with Julia Jordan, the executive director of the Lilly Awards, which recognize the work of women in theater. The Lorraine Hansberry Initiative was designed to honor Hansberry, who was the first Black woman to have a show produced on Broadway.“She’s just part of my foundational DNA as an artist,” Nottage said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “Throughout my career, if I needed to look to structure, or storytelling, or inspiration, I could go to ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ this perfect piece of literature.”The statue, a life-size likeness of Hansberry surrounded by five movable bronze chairs that represent aspects of her life, and, Saar said, invites people “to sit and think with her,” will be unveiled in Times Square on June 9. The event will include performances and remarks from Nottage and Hansberry’s 99-year-old older sister, Mamie Hansberry. It will remain in Times Square through June 12, and then begin a tour of the country over the next year or so on its way to its permanent home in Chicago, Hansberry’s birthplace.Lorraine Hansberry in 1959, the year she made history when she became the first Black woman to have a play reach Broadway. David Attie/Getty ImagesBut, Nottage said, they also wanted a more forward-looking way to honor Hansberry, leading to the initiative’s second prong: A scholarship to cover the living expenses for two female or nonbinary graduate student writers of color who create for the stage, television or film. Beginning next year, the $2.5 million scholarship fund will give its first recipients $25,000 per year, generally for up to three years — the typical length of a graduate program. (LaTanya Richardson Jackson, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her role as Lena Younger in the 2014 Broadway revival of “Raisin,” the Dramatists Guild and the National Endowment for the Arts are among the initial donors.)“So many graduate programs for writers at elite institutions like Juilliard, Yale and Brown now offer free tuition,” Nottage said, “but you see people not taking a place because they can’t afford to take three years off to pay for rent, computers, food and travel, which could be, on average, anywhere from $15,000 to $35,000 per year.”“It would’ve made a huge difference for me,” Nottage said of the scholarship fund. “When I was at the Yale School of Drama, one of the actors told me I could get public assistance to pay for groceries and electricity, and when I showed the welfare department in New Haven my financial aid package — I was doing work-study — they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re living below the poverty line.’”Hansberry, who was just 34 when she died of pancreatic cancer in 1965, is best known for “Raisin,” a semi-autobiographical family drama that tells the story of an African American family living under racial segregation on the South Side of Chicago. The play, which opened on Broadway in 1959 with Sidney Poitier in the cast, would go on to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play, making Hansberry, at 29, the youngest American and first Black recipient of the award.The life-size statue shows Hansberry holding a flame. It will be surrounded by five movable bronze chairs that represent aspects of her life and work. Nolwen Cifuentes for The New York TimesHansberry was also active in political and social movements, including the fight for civil rights, regularly writing articles about racial, economic and gender inequality for the Black newspaper Freedom. She also wrote letters signed “L.H.N.” or “L.N.” — for Lorraine Hansberry Nemiroff (her husband’s last name) — to The Ladder, a monthly national lesbian publication. In those letters, she wrestled with issues she faced as a lesbian in a heterosexual marriage and the pressure on some lesbians to conform to a more feminine dress code.Her older sister, Mamie, recalls Lorraine being bookish from a young age. Their parents allowed them to sit out on the sun porch during visits from prominent individuals, such as the poet Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson, the singer, actor and activist. “Daddy wanted us to be able to listen to some of the distinguished people who came by the house,” she said.Lorraine Hansberry would write letters to congressmen — “My mother would find them when she was cleaning her room,” Mamie Hansberry said. “She was free to write to anyone,” Mamie said, “and they would answer!”It is that spirit that Nottage and Jordan said they hope to cultivate in the next generation of playwrights. The statue’s tour will begin with stops at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem (June 13-18) and Brooklyn Bridge Park (June 23-29) before traveling to cities like Atlanta, Detroit and Los Angeles. It is also set to make stops at historically Black colleges and universities, including Spelman College in Atlanta and Howard University in Washington.Jordan said the initiative will also work with local theaters and artists to present Hansberry’s work, as well as the work of contemporary writers of color, in conjunction with the sculpture’s placement. New 42, the nonprofit organization behind the New Victory Theater, has also created a resource guide to teach middle- and high-school students about Hansberry and “Raisin,” which will be free for schools and organizations to use.“I do think that if Hansberry had continued to write and develop as an activist, one of the things she would’ve done was amplified voices of other women of color,” Nottage said.Jordan said she and Nottage had already raised $2.2 million of their $3.5 million goal for the statue construction costs, tour and scholarship fund. By 2025, Jordan said, they expect to support a total of six playwrights per year.“Everyone wants to produce these women,” Nottage said. “But we want to make sure people are prepared — that they’re secure in their voices and secure in their craft — so they don’t fail when they get that opportunity.” More

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      Cynthia Albritton, Rock’s ‘Plaster Caster,’ Dies at 74

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      She gained fame making sculptures of male rockers’ genitals, an attention-getting gimmick that she grew to regard as art and that became part of rock ’n’ roll lore.“Do I have a favorite?” the artist Cynthia Albritton once said of her signature works. “No, I love them all.”But, she added, in a 1995 interview with The Evening Standard of London, “other people are most interested in the Hendrix.”The Hendrix, also sometimes referred to as the Penis de Milo, is a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix’s genitalia. Ms. Albritton, better known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, made the piece in 1968, an early entry in what would become a series of more than 50 phallic casts, most of rock musicians, and ultimately part of rock ’n’ roll lore.There are songs about her, including Kiss’s “Plaster Caster.” That was also the title of a 2001 documentary film about her work. In addition to Hendrix, Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin’ Spoonful, Eric Burdon of the Animals, Wayne Kramer of the MC5 and Jon Langford of the Mekons are among those represented in her collection.Ms. Albritton died on April 21 at a care facility in Chicago. She was 74. Chris Hellner, a close friend, said the cause was cerebrovascular disease.What became her claim to fame started as an assignment for an art class she was taking at the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois in 1966. The professor told students that their homework was to make a cast of “something that could retain its shape, something solid,” as Ms. Albritton put it in a 2012 video interview with Rock Scene Magazine.Accounts have varied, but most say that her first subjects were two male friends. Soon, though, she had moved on to rockers, since she was, as she acknowledged, one of those fans who liked to chase the famous.“Originally I saw it as a great ruse to divert rock stars from the other girls,” she told The Evening Standard. “Only by accident did it become an art form. I take it seriously, though there is an absurd side. But I’m laughing with them, not at them.”In the anything-goes era of the late 1960s, Ms. Albritton didn’t have much trouble finding rockers willing to be immortalized, especially after Frank Zappa heard about what she was doing and promoted her efforts (though declining to be cast himself). She did, however, have trouble finding the right medium, trying a variety of substances and methods before hitting on dental mold.If the sculptures started out as a lark, the subjects who cooperated with her saw something more in her efforts.“Hers was a revolutionary art in a time that demanded revolutionary work,” Mr. Kramer, who had his sculptural session in the late 1960s, said by email. “She smashed the barriers of sexual conversation and helped open up people’s minds to the endless possibilities of art.”Mr. Langford, who was cast about 20 years after Mr. Kramer and is an artist as well as a musician, had a similar assessment.“I think Cynthia was a brilliant conceptual artist who made her art with great humor, a deep love of music and a reckless disregard for societal norms,” he said, also by email. “It was fun and deadly serious at the same time — a mad science experiment, really.”Ms. Albritton, whose works were eventually taken seriously enough to be exhibited at galleries, acknowledged that technical difficulties left her collection not as complete as it might have been.“I’m sorry to say I’ve had some mold failures on some very groovy people,” she said in the 2012 interview.Mr. Kramer related some details of his casting session.“Personally, I thought being asked signaled my arrival as a bona fide member of the rock and roll community,” he said. “A real career milestone! Sadly, on the night of my casting, Cynthia was ‘short handed’” — that is, the assistant whose job was to make sure the penises were erect wasn’t there.“Timing was crucial, and on this night it all fell apart,” Mr. Kramer said. “I was left to attempt to reach my full manliness alone, and I failed miserably. My finished cast ended up as a small plaster representation, a mere shell of what could have been. I think it’s one of the funniest of the collection, as do so many others. And, no matter, I’m proud to be included.”Cynthia Dorothy Albritton was born on May 24, 1947, in Chicago. Her father, Edward, was a postal clerk, and her mother, Dorothy (Wysocki) Albritton, was a secretary. For decades Ms. Albritton would not give her last name in interviews because she didn’t want her mother to know what she was up to.She grew up in Chicago, a big stop on the circuit for touring rock bands major and minor. She was particularly drawn to the British bands, she said — “cute British boys with long hair and tight pants.” Pamela Des Barres, in her 1987 memoir, “I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie,” wrote that Ms. Albritton seemed an unlikely person to get zippers unzipped.“She was painfully shy,” she wrote, “and I couldn’t imagine her with the alginate and plaster, buried in Eric Burdon’s crotch area, but I saw the casts for myself, and was wowed by the artistry involved.”Ms. Albritton, in a 2005 interview with The Sunday Age of Melbourne, Australia, said Zappa’s backing was key.“Frank was just the most important person in my life, my mentor and my supporter and my dear friend and shoulder to cry on,” she said. “He was the first person in the world to tell me I was an artist.”But her connection to Zappa, who died in 1993, resulted in a court case. At one point, after her home was burglarized, Ms. Albritton turned her sculptures over for safekeeping to Herb Cohen, a music industry figure who had business dealings with Zappa. She had to sue him to get them back, a case she won in 1993.She leaves no immediate survivors.Ms. Albritton continued to make male sculptures over the years — the actor Anthony Newley was among the nonmusicians in her collection — and eventually added women’s breasts to her repertory.“Breasts have been ignored for too long,” she said in the 1995 interview, possibly satirically. Her breast subjects included Sally Timms of the Mekons and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. In 2009, the conceptual artist Rob Pruitt presented her with the Rob Pruitt Award at an irony-heavy performance event called “The First Annual Art Awards” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.Ms. Albritton said that in recent, less exploratory decades, finding willing subjects had gotten more difficult. But she remained interested.“As long as there are talented musicians with appendages,” she said in a video in 2011, “I’ll be available for my casting call.” More

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      Camille Norment Explores New Sonic Terrains at Dia Chelsea

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      The composer and sculptor, born in America and based in Norway, presents two installations on the border of art and music.In the late 1960s and 1970s, the best place to hear new music was often not a concert hall, but an art gallery. Back then, while Carnegie Hall and the still-new Lincoln Center played it safe uptown, the minimalist composer Steve Reich was presenting his rhythmic, exacting compositions down at the Park Place Gallery, led by Paula Cooper. You could hear Philip Glass’s “Music in 12 Parts” at Leo Castelli Gallery, or Meredith Monk’s a cappella ululations at the Walker Art Center. Composers and artists collaborated with ease — La Monte Young wrote compositions for the sculptor Robert Morris; Glass assisted Richard Serra in the creation of his early splashes of lead — and the very distinction between new art and new music could be hazy: the Fluxus artists Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Allan Kaprow and Yoko Ono were all trained in music composition.New York still has some independent institutions where music and art commingle, like the ambitious Brooklyn nonprofit Blank Forms. But on the whole, contemporary art seems a little afraid of ambitious new music; the performer who makes it into the museum these days is more likely to be a DJ or a pop star like Solange, who uses the prestige of the white cube as essentially an Instagram-optimized backdrop. (As to the epochal catastrophe of “Björk,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015, we are going to pass without comment.) A few institutions with roots in that 1970s moment have maintained the interdisciplinary flame. Last month, the Rothko Chapel in Houston (born 1971) invited the composer Tyshawn Sorey to present a major new work in its crepuscular galleries, as Morton Feldman had done 50 years before.And here in New York the Dia Art Foundation, which has regularly made space for composers like Young and Max Neuhaus in its minimal and conceptual canon, has turned its Manhattan galleries over to Camille Norment, the Oslo-based American composer, musician and artist. This is the second exhibition at Dia’s reopened Chelsea galleries since the long-delayed reopening, and fills two adjacent galleries with sonic installations, one austere and one intricate, one high-pitched and one low-toned. Both make use of feedback and resonance effects, and treat music as both sonic and physical phenomena. Both are rigorous yet accessible, and both may leave you hungry to see the artist in concert.The better of Norment’s two new works — both are untitled; the show is called “Plexus” — is in the first gallery, which contains a monumental brass structure in two parts, standing alone in the empty space. The lower part is an inverted bell, a little below human adult height, with a gently flared lip like a calla lily’s. Suspended just above the bell aperture is a second, elongated brass form that looks like a liquid frozen in mid-drip. The only other objects in the room are four long microphones pointed at the sculpture, which produce sonic feedback from the brass instrument, soft, sustained and sublime. The instrument is therefore less a bell than a singing bowl, its tones gently, continuously distorted by spectators’ (or listeners’) motions.A view of the second gallery in “Plexus” (2022), which is filled with dozens of planks of wood. Embedded in them are speakers that play looped recordings of a droning choir.Camille Norment and Dia Art Foundation; Bill Jacobson Studio, New YorkThe ringing produced by this hieratic brass sculpture has both a plastic and a sonic component — a point Norment underscores by listing the media used in this installation as “brass, sine waves, autonomous feedback system, and archival radio static.” In other words, she’s using periodic sound (that is, sine waves) as both a sculptural material that she can mold, like a sculptor shapes metal or stone, and also a spontaneously produced phenomenon of the brass and the microphones, similar to the tones of a trumpet or saxophone.The room is a sculptural installation as well as an active musical instrument, and after a few minutes its resonant keening takes on an Apollonian dignity. As for the last element, the recorded radio static, I could only hear it faintly when I got close to the brass bell. It provides a bit of a beat but it seems an extraneous addition, especially after reading an explanatory text on Dia’s website that reveals the source of the static to be from ’60s and ’70s “community reporting and documentation of social and environmental struggles.” I’m not sure that explicit political source material was needed. Because all on its own, Norment’s ringing and vibrating sound system lets us experience a fragile interdependence of bodies and environments. In here, we are at once creators, listeners and corrupters of an ecology of sound.The second gallery is much busier. Norment has filled it with dozens of planks of wood — of “responsibly sourced wood,” Dia informs us, with a whiff of Whole Foods solicitude. They reach from the floor to the ceiling, and their chocolate brown tones come close to matching the gallery’s rib-vaulted roof. Embedded in the planks are speakers, which play looped recordings of a droning choir, whose low bass notes contrast with the higher-frequency sound of the bell room. You can sit or lie down on the planks, and feel the singing travel through your thighs and buttocks when the chorus crescendos. But the use of recordings, the somewhat milky ah-ah-ah-ahs of the singers, and the maritime overtones of the planks make this installation more like an illustration of a musical ecology. What makes the brass work more exciting is that it constitutes one, out of sound and space.Norment was born in 1970 near Washington, D.C., but since 2005 she has lived in Oslo — the Norwegian capital that last decade emerged as one of Europe’s most fecund art centers. (A lot of the new ferment comes from its excellent art school, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, where Norment is a senior faculty member.) Her sonic installations often make use of the natural frequencies of materials, objects and even whole buildings, including at the 2015 Venice Biennale, where she used microphones and other transducers to turn the Nordic pavilion into a constant broadcaster of tones.She also leads an ensemble, the Camille Norment Trio, featuring the electric guitar, the Norwegian fiddle and her own instrument: the glass armonica, invented by Benjamin Franklin in the 1760s, which consists of blown glass discs arrayed on a spindle that produce ethereal tones when rubbed. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the glass armonica was an instrument associated with divinity and also horror: Donizetti used it for the original orchestrations of the mad scene in “Lucia di Lammermoor.”Her engagement with feedback and resonant frequencies continues an exploration that Reich undertook by swinging microphones in front of speakers for his “Pendulum Music,” or that Jimi Hendrix produced in the space between guitar and amp. And it’s an engagement that dovetails quite naturally with the minimalist, process-oriented and environmental artists that Dia exalts up in Beacon. One of the values of this show may be to get artists and art audiences to think a little harder about what’s in our headphones as we strut through Chelsea or sulk on the train. Spend some time listening to the frequencies of her brass bell, and a clean distinction between the sonic and the sculptural — between music and art — starts to dissipate into air.Camille Norment: PlexusThrough January 2023. Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 845-231-0811; diaart.org. More

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      10 Works of Art That Evaded the Algorithm This Year

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      Contemplation, not clicks: Our critic looks back on marble sculptures in Rome, songs of “atmospheric anxiety” and the Frick Collection in a new light.From left: A performer in “Catasterism in Three Movements”; one of the Torlonia Marbles; a detail from the refurbished Hôtel de la Marine in Paris. Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Tom Bisig, Basel; Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times; James Hill for The New York TimesThe coronavirus pandemic is a health crisis with so many cultural sequelae: above all, the absorption of all facets of our lives deeper into networks and phone screens. Even more than last year, I’ve been drawn to art, music and movies that, in one way or another, evade the workings of likes and shares — and carve out a place for human creativity in a world too governed by algorithmic logic.‘Cézanne Drawing’The apple of my eye. The Museum of Modern Art’s meticulous, almost overwhelming summer exhibition distilled modernism’s father figure to his essence, revealing the day-by-day, stroke-by-stroke scrutiny needed to make a piece of fruit as weighty as the Holy Family. Those bottom-heavy pears, those clumpy bathers. Those short daubs of green and blue in his views of Mont-Sainte-Victoire. Those Provençal rock formations — rocks of air and watercolor, Cézanne as geologist! What these hundreds of sheets reconfirmed, right on time, was that your art will never change another person’s life if it merely shows what you think. You need the distinction, the seriousness, that can only come from form. (Read our review of “Cézanne Drawing.”)“Bathers,” an 1890 pencil and watercolor work by Paul Cézanne, was featured in a Museum of Modern Art show.Metropolitan Museum of ArtRyusuke HamaguchiI’d call the 42-year-old Japanese film director the most exciting in years if he weren’t so … calm. “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi’s unfailingly precise tale of a widowed actor sublimating his grief through his chauffeur and Chekhov, has virtues one fears have gone missing from cinema: long takes, guillotine-crisp editing, an unhurried faith in the importance of images. Like Jacques Rivette and Mike Leigh before him, Hamaguchi contrasts his unobtrusive camerawork with the conventions of theater — in this case, a multilingual “Uncle Vanya” production that builds to a silent, heart-stopping finale, when the troupe’s Sonya sighs “We shall rest!” in Korean sign language. Add to that “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” Hamaguchi’s three-part fugue of love and intuition also released this year, and you have the emergence of a stunning talent who finds the romance in rigor. (Read our review of “Drive My Car.”)Barney & FriendsTwo decades ago his world-making was mistaken for American Wagnerism; but Matthew Barney is more collaborative and more relaxed than you’d think, and he’s doing the best work of his career in the lighter register first seen in his 2019 film “Redoubt.”For the performance “Catasterism in Three Movements,” this September at the Schaulager in Switzerland, he ceded more than half the evening to the Basel Sinfonietta, who performed Jonathan Bepler’s churning music alongside a Berniniesque sculpture of copper, brass and scorched pine. Three women brought the remainder of “Catasterism” to life: the contact improvisation pioneer K.J. Holmes, the Cree hoop dancer Sandra Lamouche, and the athlete Jill Bettonvil as a sharpshooting Diana who pumped a dense-as-flesh Barney sculpture full of lead. (Read our review of Matthew Barney’s “Redoubt.”)K.J. Holmes, a Cree hoop dancer, was featured in “Catasterism in Three Movements,” a collaboration between the artist Matthew Barney and the composer Jonathan Bepler.Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation; Tom Bisig, Basel‘The Torlonia Marbles’Alone in Rome this spring, at the nearly empty Capitoline Museums, I saw the first public display in half a century of the greatest collection of ancient art in private hands. Travel restrictions made an accidental sleeper of the Torlonia family’s Greek and Roman sculptures: dozens of portrait busts, a hirsute billy goat reclining like a love god, a shattered Hercules recomposed from a hundred shards. Rome was my first trip abroad since the pandemic, and I’d submit to a dozen P.C.R. tests to see this actually legendary collection before it disappears again on Jan. 9. (Read our report on the Torlonia Marbles.)More than 90 rarely exhibited sculptures were on display in the “Torlonia Marbles” exhibition at Rome’s Capitoline Museum.Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times‘Promises’Astral but never spacey, architectural yet also boundless, this nine-movement, album-length composition deserved every one of the rave reviews that rained down upon its release in March. As Pharoah Sanders’s subdued tenor sax (and occasional vocalizations) weave around the London Symphony Orchestra’s strings and the synths and celesta of Sam Shepherd — a.k.a. Floating Points, a British electronic musician nearly five decades Sanders’s junior — “Promises” comes to feel like a self-regulating ecosystem, an ever denser net of music and motion. These guys knew what they were doing when they chose, for the album’s cover, a painting by Julie Mehretu, whose retrospective this year at the Whitney Museum of American Art had the same accumulating grandeur. (Read our review of “Promises.”)Frick MadisonThe secret to good decorating: just buy the best stuff and do nothing! The Frick’s down-to-the-pith reinstallation in the Whitney’s vacated building refiltered the Vermeers and Velázquezes we thought we knew, and isolated Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” in a sublime Brutalist cell illuminated by one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows. What Frick Madison has proved, more subtly, is that we can give art context in a hundred digital formats; museums’ bigger challenge is carving time and space to really look. (Read our story on the making of Frick Madison.)Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” is illuminated by one of the architect Marcel Breuer’s trapezoid windows while on display at the Frick Madison.Gus Powell for The New York TimesThe Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’I feel as useless / As a tree in a city park / Standing as a symbol of what / We have blown apart …. As forests burned in B.C. and diplomats dithered in Glasgow, the Toronto singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman, who performs as the Weather Station, turned in an unreserved, openhearted album of atmospheric anxiety, in which guitars mingle with greenhouse gases and loss is measured in metric tons. She knows we don’t need artists to tell us the climate has changed; we need them to tell us how we have. (Read our interview with the singer.)Parisian RenovationsParis had a quartet of major cultural openings this year. The Bourse de Commerce, renovated by Tadao Ando for the contemporary art collection of François Pinault, drew the most Instagram shares, but it was two renovated historical sites — the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of Parisian history, and the Hôtel de la Marine, the stupefyingly grand naval headquarters — that best married old and new. The city’s sweetest surprise is the old Samaritaine department store, reopened after 16 years, its Art Nouveau expanses renewed with the undulating glass of the Japanese firm Sanaa. (Read our story on the restoration of the Hôtel de la Marine.)The Hôtel de la Marine, the former headquarters of France’s Ministry of the Navy, has reopened as a museum.James Hill for The New York TimesBooks Are Back!Closer to home, the New York Public Library re-emerged from a far too long pandemic closure with a sweet new home: the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, formerly the decrepit Mid-Manhattan Library, rethought and revived by the Dutch firm Mecanoo with Beyer Blinder Belle. Its clean white expanses have computers galore (there’s even a Bloomberg terminal for budding teen traders), but the core remains its 400,000-strong circulating book collection, open for free browsing. A few years ago, the N.Y.P.L. was planning to sell this place, and to exile the books in its main research branch to New Jersey. The Niarchos — as well as Toshiko Mori’s renovation of the Brooklyn Public Library — is an affirmation that cities need readers, and readers need print. (Read our review of the new library.)Daniil Medvedev’s MockeryThe year’s finest and funniest performance art took place at Arthur Ashe Stadium, when the lanky young Russian smacked his last serve, won the U.S. Open title — and dumped his whole body onto to the court, miming a PlayStation move as he lolled like a dead fish. As arrogant as it was ridiculous, Medvedev’s side flop has stuck with me all this fall as a Gen-Z master class in how to stay human in a world of memes. If you must dive into the algorithm, then do it with total contempt. (Read our profile of the “octopus” Daniil Medvedev.) More